Stress Treatment in Indianapolis

Stress explains the bulk of the degenerative health conditions we experience. Nutrition is the fundamental defense against stress. That said, stress is the greatest threat to nutrition. Understanding the interplay of stress and nutrition is essential to resolving many health issues.

When people say they’re stressed, what does that mean? Usually it means they’re challenged to cope with events and circumstances - perhaps a job, a spouse, music that assaults the ear, bills, road rage, a sick child or an elderly parent, or a nagging worry a shooter or bomber is in the same mall as we. These are not things people choose to deal with but circumstances which impose themselves on us and demand we deal with them. They take us out of our rhythms and routines or threaten our security. We may not think of it in these terms, but when we feel stressed, we feel we’ve inadequate resources (time, money, skill) to meet the demands upon us and still maintain order over the rest of our lives.

Stress is emotionally taxing, but stress is a physiological phenomenon and nutrition is the number one safeguard against stress. No, nutrition will not solve money or elderly parent problems, but what nutrition may do is enable us to meet the challenges in our life without depleting our energy and compromising our health. Nutrition can modify our emotional response to the demands placed upon us.

Let’s look at what stress is from a scientific and physiological viewpoint. Hans Selye was a Canadian endocrinologist, researcher and writer who coined the term stress, and he defined stress as “the non-specific response of the body to any demand for change.” Stress, then, is not the event in the environment – that thing in the environment is the stressor, the stress inducer. Stress is an observable physical change to the physical body that is incited by stressors.

To understand Selye’s definition it may first help to see all cells and all living things reveal a desire to stay alive, or live. This desire is revealed in their behaviors, which are self-preserving. Your body is a sophisticated and highly intelligent machine of which all the parts are essential to the well-being of the body, and all activity within our body is devoted to maintaining this machine. Your body accomplishes this through the nutrition process; digesting and absorbing food, absorbing water and air then converting these materials to building blocks and energy to repair, maintain and operate the various subsystems from cells to organs to brain and, finally, eliminating what is not useful in order to keep the environment clean. Like you, your body does not like disruptions to its routine.

Now, back to Selye’s definition of stress as the non-specificresponse of the body to any demand for change. All of the stressors identified in the first paragraph are demands that we change our behavior from our normal, (hopefully) relaxed routine. Contending with any of these demands takes energy, and that energy must come from our nutrition and it must be energy which would otherwise sustain the physiological processes and fuel our desired activities.

So, what is a non-specific response? Selye performed experiments on animals in which he subjected them to various stressors. He observed the demands for change induced the physiological system to change its normal routine of repairing, maintaining and energizing its systems and divert its energy to other uses. He observed if these stressors were severe or frequent enough, over time they resulted in yet additional and lasting changes to the body, but these additional changes were non-specific, or not the same every time for every animal subjected to the same stressor. Some of the changes he identified were stomach ulcers, weight gain, heart attacks, strokes and arthritis. Now that we know what stress is, we can add headaches, anxiety and indigestion, conditions people experience which it is difficult to verify in animals.

The outcome of the stress process is non-specific, but Selye observed the PROCESS leading to the non-specific outcomes is very specific, or the same in every case, and it begins with what we call the stress response,fight or flight syndrome, something all us have experienced at one time or another. When we encounter an event in our environment which we perceive as a threat to our well-being it triggers the release of the hormone epinephrine, commonly referred to as adrenaline. The classic example is encountering a hungry bear when hiking in the woods. Seeing the bear frightens us, which triggers the release of adrenaline that gives us a sudden rush of energy and enables us either to fight or run from the bear. If we’re successful, we live to tell the tale. The fight or flight mechanism, then, is a survival mechanism.

What happens after the release of the hormone epinephrine is also predictable. The hormonal release causes an instantaneous and very specific redistribution of energy within the body. The body immediately ceases using resources to maintain and repair itself. The brain, the reproductive system and the digestive system are not needed in times of emergency and are deprived of energy, shut down. All the conserved energy is then redistributed to the muscles in the form of glucose in order to maximize the strength to run or fight.

Encountering a bear that threatens us should be a rare event, and once we run away from the bear, we feel safe, and calm down, the physiological system will also calm down and revert to its routine. We’ll return to eating, drinking and breathing normally to supply the body with energy. Then, our highly intelligent physiological system will take up its routine, restore energy to the brain, digestive system and sexual organs and return to the business of repairing, maintaining and energizing the bodily processes. We’ll go back to doing what we do. But what happens if we run away from the bear and into the path of a lion, and after escaping the lion we run into a tiger – chronic stressors?

Each time we encounter a stressor which triggers the flight or fight response, the body will release adrenaline and go through its process of ceasing repair and maintenance, shutting down digestion, reproduction and the brain and diverting the energy to the muscles. When stressors are frequent the body never has opportunity to do normal routine maintenance and now systems fall into disrepair.

There comes a point, if stressors are of sufficient frequency and duration, there is no more energy to be taken from these non-essential systems to power the muscles. When this happens the physiological process will engage emergency response plan B. In plan B, the body will engage the process of catabolism, tearing down existing structures to use their materials to create additional energy to fuel muscles. One of the first sites of catabolism is the stomach lining, where the protein is taken from the lining and converted to energy. Remember that the body has already shut down digestion because we're not eating while fighting the tiger, so the stomach is an idle resource. And if we don’t escape the tiger, we won’t be needing the stomach again, anyway. Once we’re safe, our body can then worry about rebuilding the stomach lining. The physiological process is extremely intelligent even in the risks it takes and trade-offs it makes.

So, what triggers the threat response? We know the sight of a bear will not automatically trigger a stress response, for we can see bears in a zoo and not feel the least bit threatened. If we were out for a hike on a high bluff overlooking a river and saw bears fishing down below, we might feel thrilled to see the sight rather than scared out of our skins. Positive or affirming emotional responses to events in our environment do not incite the flight or fight cascade. On the other hand, we can be late for work and trigger the stress response for fear of losing our job, or even when asking someone out on a date. Athletes frequently start an important game out of synch, throwing balls too hard or making dumb mistakes, whereupon an announcer will comment the players have their adrenaline pumping and need to calm down and relax – they need to handle the stress so the stress doesn’t handle them.

It appears the hormonal response is triggered by our emotional response to events within our environment. Our physiological process apparently has no capacity to assess what type of stress we face; physical, mental or emotional; whether it is a real, overblown or imagined. It has no capacity to peer through our eyes. It cannot differentiate between an attractive person who intimidates us and a burglar crawling through our window. It is absolutely reliant on our determination, which is revealed in our emotional response. When our emotions signal we’re confronting an emergency, the body immediately responds by diverting all energy to quell the threat. It acts now, and never asks questions.

So what conditions cause us to conclude we’re in an emergency? There are true emergencies for which amplified muscle strength is beneficial, but there are many instances where increased muscle strength is of no benefit – and there are detrimental effects when so much energy is provided but not used. Why do we ignite this stream of events? Why can the boss yell at three of us simultaneously and yet only one of us develops a case of high anxiety and runs out of the room crying?. Each of us responds differently, or non-specifically to stimuli in the same way our bodies respond non-specifically to stress. There is a correlation that can be reasonably made by studying behavior, and that is our perception of events is influenced by our level of energy. People who have insufficient energy will issue a stress call in a given situation where others won’t.

With this overview of stress and stress response in place it becomes easier to explain how nutrition is the greatest defense against stress and how stress is the greatest threat to nutrition.

We do live in an age of prolific stressors. For most of us there are pernicious and persistent stressors in our environment, many of which simply do not go away and from which we cannot fight or flee. When we’re confronted by these one or more of these stressors and our energy is inadequate to the demand of the moment, we express the emotional trigger that ignites the hormonal response to stress and all that follows. Because these stressors are omnipresent, it is not unusual that we find ourselves eating while the digestive system has been shut down. Meals eaten under such conditions pass through us without some part being digested, assimilated or utilized. Failure to digest food leaves our body lacking sufficient energy to meet all its needs, and setting up the likelihood we’ll encounter another moment where we’ll be energy insufficient and ignite the stress response. This is where the cascade of degenerating health begins.

One day, the available energy supply will be so low the body will start destroying itself in a last ditch effort to save itself from the crisis you’ve reported. Back and forth it goes: lack of energy promotes the stress response which impedes the nutrition process which promotes the stress response which ultimately acts in ways which impair the digestive system and we may slowly but surely starve ourselves to death in a cornucopia, starving in our own non-specific way.

Just because we starve in our own unique way doesn’t lead to the conclusion that there is a random or haphazard process at work. We each have genetic strengths and weaknesses. In times of stress, the sites of our weaknesses will be the first to succumb to damage. In addition we each have a unique diet, and if our diet is deficient in an area, that deficiency will either contribute to the damage or prevent repair of it. It is the combination of such factors that determines if we are coping with headaches, muscle pain, high blood pressure, or gall bladder pain.

The sciences of physiology and biochemistry have advanced to the point the cascade of physical events leading from health to the specific ailment of high blood pressure, indigestion, and many others can be described. It is through knowing the pathway to degeneration beginning with the digestion of food or lack thereof that we can use enzyme nutrition to restore the path to regeneration and health. Degeneration starts with stress and regeneration starts with providing adequate energy to the body through nutrition to enable the body to meet the energy demands of daily living and simultaneously provide energy for maintenance and healing so it need not resort to the stress response.

If you find you find yourself frequently frustrated, quick to anger, impatient, fearing everything’s going to collapse – your career, elevators, markets, relationships - there is a high likelihood that you have insufficient energy to meet the demands you or circumstances impose on you, and you’re utilizing the stress response to get by. How much damage has been done depends on many factors, including how long you’ve been in this life-is-an-emergency rhythm.

Office Hours

Our 96th Street office is convenient to north Indianapolis, Nora, Carmel, and Zionsville.

Chiropractic Office Hours - Dr. Mary Jo Johnson

Monday:

11:00 am-6:00 pm

Tuesday:

9:00 am-4:00 pm

Wednesday:

11:00 am-6:00 pm

Thursday:

9:00 am-4:00 pm

Friday:

Closed

Saturday:

Closed

Sunday:

Closed

Therapeutic Massage Hours - Becky Troyer, CMT

Monday:

10:00 am-7:30 pm

Tuesday:

11:00 am-6:30 pm

Wednesday:

11:30 am-7:40 pm

Thursday:

10:30 am-6:30 pm

Friday:

Special appointment only.

Saturday:

Closed

Sunday:

Closed

Lily Rigby, CMT

Monday:

11:00 am-8:00 pm

Tuesday:

10:20 am-7:00 pm

Wednesday:

11:00 am-8:00 pm

Thursday:

10:20 am-7:00 pm

Friday:

Closed

Saturday:

Closed

Sunday:

Closed

Location

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Testimonials

Reviews By Our Satisfied Patients

"Dr. Johnson is an amazing chiropractor and an amazing woman. Her staff is great, everyone is kind and there to be of service. Dr. Johnson will help you get your whole wellness life together, and will do it with kindness and care. I would send anyone here."

Mr. K.

"Fantastic people doing great work in this office. I have had back pain since my mid-20's. The chiropractic work helped, but then Kurt was able to help me figure out I had a wheat intolerance that was the root cause of my problems. If you are looking for a great support system for your health needs, look no further!"

Jeff C.

"I love this place!!! I had never been to a Chiropractor before, i thought they were scary, with all the old school treatment. Dr. Johnson is the best, her treatment plan has worked for me, i was a mess when i first went there, i suffered for months with the pain in neck, upper back and shoulders, starting the treatment on 5/25/2019. i am so much better now!Her staff is also friendly and kind, and very knowledgeable, her front desk receptionist, Emily, is the best also! Thank you all so much!"

Kim K.

"Thank you Dr. Johnson - your gentle and holistic approach to chiropractic care and wellness is greatly appreciated. Your work and that of your wellness team is among the best!"